A luminous star turn from David Haig, but the play's showing wear and tear - Racing Demon, Theatre Royal Bath, review

Jonathan Church, hailed as a miracle-worker at Chichester, is running Bath Theatre Royal’s summer season. He will be preaching to the converted: those seeking intelligent but not too arduous enlightenment, a mixture, you might say, of high and low church. I look forward to an adaptation of Hitchcock’s North by North West, to Alan Franks’s portrait of Lucian Freud starring Henry Goodman, and to Sara Kestelman giving us her Lady in the Van in that hardy Bennett perennial.

About his opening gambit, though, David Hare’s inquisition into the political wrangles and personality clashes besetting the Church of England circa 1990, I must confess to suffering misgivings – in fact, nothing less than a full-blown crisis of faith in the play.

Ashley Russell and Andrew Fraser in Racing DemonCredit:
Nobby Clark

Dutifully considered in context, Racing Demon answers to the description of one of Hare’s finest – a quietly entertaining, pithily phrased encapsulation of spiritual resolve tested in South London, at the centre of which stands, or rather kneels praying, the anguished figure of Lionel Espy, a man of the cloth more eager to do-Good than do-God and threatened with the chop by the sternly traditionalist Bishop of Southwark, while a young evangelical newcomer to his team snaps impatiently at his heels.

Broadly, the issue of how the church “connects”, how it stays relevant and useful – beautifully communicated incidentally in the much-loved sitcom Rev – remains a live one. Yet the fact that our bags are checked in the foyer tells its own story about the time we’re now in: one of bloodily manifest Islamist extremism.

Paapa Essiedu in Racing DemonCredit:
Nobby Clark

What the church’s role is going to be given the post-9/11 fractures in our pluralistic society is, of course, not on the agenda here; and while the ordination of women, an angrily gnawed bone of contention, retains the quality of a hot topic, a sub-plot involving the attempted tabloid blackmailing of an elderly gay cleric further reinforces the sense – in the wake of same-sex marriage – of a once-racey Hare play turned tortoise by time.

Church’s revival performs the right ministrations of ecclesiastical pomp – bits of set flying in and out as location-switches demand. It’s blessed with a luminous star turn of pained kindliness from the cherishable David Haig as Espy – a blessing compounded by the commanding input of Anthony Calf as the imperious Southwark, and tripled by the radiant presence of Paapa Essiedu as the fierily self-certain new kid on the block. Yet, like a frayed dog-collar, this venerable play is starting to show wear and tear.